Book 1

When at last I had been set free, either wholly or in great part, from the labours of advocacy and from my senatorial duties, I betook myself once more, Brutus, chiefly at your urging, to those studies which, though kept alive in my mind, had been laid aside as the times demanded and after a long interval interrupted; and since the system and discipline of all the arts that bear upon the right conduct of life are comprehended in the pursuit of wisdom which we call philosophy, I thought it my task to set this forth in the literature of our own tongue — not because philosophy could not be grasped through Greek writings and Greek teachers, but because it has always been my judgement that our countrymen have either discovered everything for themselves more wisely than the Greeks, or else have improved upon what they received from them, at least in those matters which they had judged worthy of their labour.

For in our manners and the ordering of our lives, and in our domestic and family affairs, we certainly maintain ourselves both better and more handsomely; and as for the commonwealth, our ancestors assuredly governed it by better institutions and laws. What need I say of the art of war? In this our countrymen have prevailed greatly by valour, and still more by discipline. And as for those things which they attained by nature rather than by letters, they are not to be compared either with Greece or with any nation whatever. For where was there ever in any people such gravity, such steadfastness, such greatness of soul, such honesty and good faith, such virtue of every kind so excellent, as to bear comparison with our forefathers?

In learning, and in every branch of letters, Greece surpassed us; and it was easy to win where there was no resistance. For while among the Greeks the most ancient class of the learned is that of the poets — since Homer and Hesiod lived before the founding of Rome, and Archilochus in the reign of Romulus — we Romans took up poetry later. It was about five hundred and ten years after the founding of Rome that Livius produced a play, in the consulship of Gaius Claudius, son of Caecus, and Marcus Tuditanus, one year before the birth of Ennius. He was older than Plautus and Naevius. Late, then, were poets either known or welcomed among us. Yet it stands in the Origines that guests at banquets were once accustomed to sing to the flute of the virtues of famous men; but that no honour attached to this calling is shown by a speech of Cato's, in which he cast it up as a reproach to Marcus Nobilior that he had taken poets with him into his province — and that consul had, as we know, taken Ennius into Aetolia. The less honour, then, that was paid to poets, the less were such pursuits cultivated; nor, even so, where men of great genius arose in that field,

did they fall short of the renown of the Greeks. Do we suppose that, had it been counted to the credit of Fabius, a man of the noblest birth, that he could paint, we too should not have had many a Polyclitus and Parrhasius? Honour nourishes the arts, and all men are kindled to their pursuits by glory, while those that are everywhere held in disesteem lie always neglected. The Greeks judged the highest cultivation to lie in the music of strings and voices; and so Epaminondas, in my judgement the foremost man of Greece, is said to have played excellently on the lyre, while Themistocles, some years before, when he declined the lyre at a banquet, was thought the more unschooled. Thus in Greece musicians flourished, and all learned the art, nor was anyone who was ignorant of it thought fully accomplished in his education.

Among them geometry was held in the highest honour, and so nothing was more illustrious than the mathematicians; but we have fixed the bounds of this art by its usefulness in measuring and reckoning. On the other hand we were quick to embrace the orator — at first not a learned one, but apt for speaking, and afterwards learned as well. For it is recorded that Galba, Africanus, and Laelius were men of learning, and that Cato, who was older than they, was eager for it; then came Lepidus, Carbo, and the Gracchi, and after them such great men down to our own age that little or nothing was yielded to the Greeks. Philosophy has lain neglected until this very day and has had no light shed on it by Latin letters; it is for us to illumine and awaken it, so that, if while engaged in affairs we were of some service to our fellow citizens, we may serve them also, if we can, in our leisure.

And here we must labour the more diligently because many Latin books are now said to have been written thoughtlessly by men who were indeed excellent but not sufficiently learned. For it may well happen that a man thinks rightly and yet cannot express what he thinks with elegance; but for anyone to commit his reflections to writing who can neither arrange them, nor set them in a clear light, nor allure his reader with any charm, is the mark of a man squandering without restraint both his leisure and his letters. And so such writers read their own books only with their own circle, and no one touches them save those who wish to be granted the same licence of writing for themselves. Wherefore, if by our industry we have brought some credit to oratory, with far greater zeal we shall open up the springs of philosophy, from which those gifts also flowed.

But just as Aristotle, a man of the highest genius, knowledge, and copiousness, when he was moved by the renown of the rhetorician Isocrates, began to teach young men to speak as well, and to join prudence with eloquence, so it is my resolve neither to lay aside my former zeal for speaking, and at the same time to occupy myself with this greater and richer art. For I have always judged that to be the perfect philosophy which can discourse copiously and with ornament upon the greatest questions; and I have given myself to this exercise so earnestly that I have even ventured to hold disputations in the manner of the Greek schools. So lately, after your departure, when several of my friends were with me at my Tusculan villa, I made trial of what I could do in that kind. For as I formerly declaimed upon set cases — and no one did so longer than I — so this is now my old man's declamation. I would bid them propose whatever subject any of them wished to hear discussed; and upon that, either sitting or walking, I would dispute.

And so I have set down in the same number of books the five days' disputations — schools, as the Greeks call them. The manner was this: when the one who wished to hear had said what seemed to him to be the case, then I would argue against it. For this, as you know, is the old and Socratic method of disputing against another's opinion; for so, Socrates thought, what was most like the truth could most easily be found out. But that our disputations may be set forth the more conveniently, I shall present them as though the thing were being enacted, not narrated. Thus, then, the opening will arise. — Death seems to me to be an evil.

— To those who are dead, or to those who must die? — To both. — It is wretched, then, since it is an evil. — Certainly. — Therefore both those to whom it has already fallen to die, and those to whom it will fall, are wretched. — So it seems to me. — Then no one is not wretched. — No one at all. — And indeed, if you wish to be consistent, all who have been born or ever shall be are not only wretched, but everlastingly wretched. For if you called only those wretched who must die, you would except no one of the living — since all must die — yet there would be an end of misery in death. But since the dead too are wretched, we are born into everlasting misery. For those who perished a hundred thousand years ago must needs be wretched — or rather, all, whoever have been born. — So in truth I judge. — Tell me, I pray:

do those things terrify you — the three-headed Cerberus among the dead, the roaring of Cocytus, the ferrying across Acheron, Tantalus touching the surface of the water with his chin yet wasted with thirst; then that stone which Sisyphus rolls, sweating in his straining and getting not a whit forward? Perhaps too the inexorable judges, Minos and Rhadamanthus? Before them neither Lucius Crassus will defend you nor Marcus Antonius, nor — since the case will be tried before Greek judges — will you be able to call in Demosthenes; you yourself must plead your own cause before that vast assembly. These things perhaps you fear, and on that account you reckon death an everlasting evil. — Do you think me so far out of my wits as to believe such things? — Then you do not believe them? — Not in the least. — A sorry tale you tell, by Hercules! — Why, pray? — Because I could be eloquent if I were to argue against them. For who could not, in a case of that kind? Or what difficulty is there in refuting these monstrous fancies of poets and painters?

— And yet there are books full of philosophers disputing against these very things. — Foolishly enough. For who is so witless as to be moved by them? — If, then, men are not wretched in the world below, neither are there any at all in the world below. — So in truth I judge. — Where, then, are those whom you call wretched, or what place do they inhabit? For if they exist, they cannot be nowhere. — For my part I think they are nowhere. — Therefore they do not even exist? — Just so; and yet wretched for this very reason, that they are nothing.

— By now I would rather you feared Cerberus than spoke things so ill-considered. — How so, pray? — The same one whom you deny to exist, you say exists. Where is that sharpness of yours? For when you say he is wretched, you say that one who does not exist exists. — I am not so dull as to say that. — What, then, do you say? — That, for example's sake, Marcus Crassus is wretched, who lost that great fortune by his death; that Gnaeus Pompeius is wretched, who was bereft of so great a glory; in short, that all are wretched who are deprived of this light of day. — You roll back to the same place. For they must exist, if they are wretched; but you were just now denying that those exist who are dead. If, then, they do not exist, they can be nothing; and so they are not even wretched. — Perhaps I am not saying even what I feel; for that very thing — not to exist, when one has existed — I count most wretched. — What?

more wretched than never to have existed at all? Then those who are not yet born are already wretched, because they do not exist; and we, if after death we are to be wretched, were wretched before we were born. But I do not remember being wretched before I was born; and if your memory is better, I should like to know whether you recall anything of yourself. — You jest, as though I said that those are wretched who have not been born, and not rather that those are wretched who are dead. — You say, then, that they exist. — No, but that, because they do not exist, having once existed, they are for that reason wretched. — Do you not see that you speak self-contradiction? For what is more contradictory than that one who does not exist should be not merely wretched, but anything at all? When you go out by the Capene Gate and see the tombs of the Calatini, the Scipios, the Servilii, the Metelli, do you think those men wretched? — Since you press me on a word, hereafter I shall not say that they "are" wretched, but only "wretched," for this very reason, that they do not exist. — You do not say, then, "Marcus Crassus is wretched," but only "wretched Marcus Crassus"? — Precisely. — As though whatever you assert in that fashion must not be either true or false! Are you not even versed in logic?

For first of all this is laid down: that every proposition (for so it occurs to me for the present to render axioma; I shall use another term later if I find a better) — this, then, is a proposition, which is either true or false. When, therefore, you say "wretched Marcus Crassus," either you say "Crassus is wretched," so that it may be judged whether it be true or false, or you say nothing at all. — Come, I now grant that those who are dead are not wretched, since you have wrung from me the admission that those who do not exist at all cannot even be wretched. But what of this? We who live, since we must die, are we not wretched? For what sweetness can there be in life, when day and night one must reflect that at any moment one must die? — And do you grasp how great an evil you have cast off from the human condition?

— In what way? — Because, if death were wretched even for the dead, we should have in life a kind of infinite and everlasting evil; but now I see the goal-line, and when the course has been run to it, there is nothing further to be dreaded. But you seem to me to follow the opinion of Epicharmus, a man as shrewd as he was not without wit, Sicilian that he was. — What opinion? For I do not know it. — I shall tell it, if I can, in Latin; for you know that I am no more wont to speak Greek in a Latin discourse than Latin in a Greek one. — And rightly so. But what, pray, is that opinion of Epicharmus? — "I do not wish to die, but to be dead I count as nothing." — Now I recognize the Greek. But since you have compelled me to grant that those who are dead are not wretched, complete the work, if you can, so that I may not think it wretched even to have to die.

— That indeed is no trouble at all, but I am attempting greater things. — How is this no trouble? Or what, pray, are those greater things? — Because, since after death there is no evil, not even death is an evil, the time next to which is after death, in which you grant there is no evil: so it is not an evil even to have to die; for that is to arrive at that which we confess to be no evil. — Unfold this more fully, I pray. For these points, being rather thorny, compel me to confess before I assent. But what are those greater things which you say you are attempting? — To show, if I can, that death is not only not an evil, but even a good. — That, indeed, I do not demand; yet I long to hear it. For even if you do not achieve what you wish, still you will achieve this, that death is not an evil. But I shall not interrupt you at all; I would rather hear a continuous discourse. — What if I should ask you something?

will you not answer? — That would be arrogant; but, unless something makes it necessary, I would rather you did not ask. — I shall humour you, and will explain as best I can the things you wish — yet not like the Pythian Apollo, as though what I say were sure and fixed, but as one poor man among many, following what is probable by conjecture. For I have no means of advancing further than to see what is like the truth; certainties are for those who both declare that such things can be perceived and profess themselves to be wise men. — As you please; we are ready to listen.

— First, then, we must see what death itself, which seems the most familiar of things, really is. For there are some who think death to be the departure of the soul from the body; some who think no departure takes place, but that soul and body perish together, the soul being extinguished within the body. Of those who hold that the soul departs, some think it is straightway scattered, some that it endures for a long time, some forever. As to what the soul itself is, moreover, or where, or whence, there is great disagreement. To some the heart itself seems to be the soul, whence men are called "heart-less," "wit-less," and "of one heart," and the famous Nasica, twice consul, was called Corculum, "Little Heart," and "a man of excellent heart, the shrewd Aelius Sextus." Empedocles holds the soul to be the blood suffused about the heart; to others a certain part of the brain has seemed to hold the sovereignty of the soul; to others neither the heart itself nor any part of the brain seems to be the soul,

but some have said the seat and place of the soul is in the heart, others in the brain. The soul, moreover, some call anima, the breath — as most of our people do; and the name declares it: for we say "to draw breath" (agere animam) and "to breathe out" (efflare), and call men "spirited" (animosi) and "well-disposed" (bene animati) and speak of acting "from the heart's intent" (ex animi sententia); the soul itself (animus) is named from breath (anima). To Zeno the Stoic the soul seems to be fire. But these things I have named — heart, brain, breath, fire — the common run hold; the rest, mostly, single thinkers hold. As, long before, the ancients, and most recently Aristoxenus, a musician and likewise a philosopher, held the soul to be a certain tension of the body itself, like the thing called harmony in song and on the strings: so that out of the nature and figure of the whole body various motions are stirred up, as sounds are in song.

He did not stray from his own craft, and yet he said something which, whatever its worth, had been said and explained long before by Plato. Xenocrates denied that the soul has any shape or, as it were, body, and said it is number, whose power, as had already been Pythagoras's view, is greatest in nature. His teacher Plato fashioned a threefold soul, whose sovereign part — that is, reason — he placed in the head as in a citadel; and the two other parts he willed to obey, namely anger and desire, which he separated into their own places: anger in the breast, desire he set beneath the midriff.

Dicaearchus, however, in that discourse which he reports as held at Corinth in three books, makes many learned men dispute in the first book; in the two others he brings on a certain aged Pherecrates of Phthia, whom he says was sprung from Deucalion, arguing that there is no soul at all, and that this name is wholly empty, and that it is in vain that we call things "living" and "animate," since there is no soul or breath within man or within beast; and that all the power by which we either act or feel is spread equally throughout all living bodies and is not separable from the body, being indeed nothing, nor is there anything except a single and simple body, so fashioned that by the tempering of its nature it has life and feeling.

Aristotle — far excelling all others, save that I always except Plato, both in genius and in diligence — when he had embraced those four familiar kinds of first principles from which all things arise, holds that there is a certain fifth nature, from which mind comes. For to think, to foresee, to learn, to teach, to discover something, to remember so many things, to love and to hate, to desire and to fear, to be troubled and to rejoice — these things and the like, he holds, are in none of those four kinds; he brings in a fifth kind, lacking a name, and so he calls the soul itself by a new name, endelecheia, as it were a certain continuous and perpetual motion. Unless perhaps some escape me, these are nearly all the opinions about the soul. For Democritus — a great man indeed, but one who makes the soul out of smooth and round little bodies by a kind of chance concourse — let us pass him over; for there is nothing among those men which the swarm of atoms does not bring to pass.

Which of these opinions is true, some god may see; which is likest the truth is a great question. Do we, then, prefer to decide among these opinions, or to return to our proposed theme? — I should wish both, if it could be; but it is hard to mingle them. Wherefore, if without discussing those matters we can be freed from the fear of death, let us do that; but if that cannot be done save by unfolding this question of the soul, let us take this now, if you think fit, and the other another time. — What I perceive you prefer, that I think the more convenient; for reasoning will bring it about that, whichever of the opinions I have set forth be true, death is either no evil or rather a good.

For if the soul is heart, or blood, or brain, then surely, since it is body, it will perish with the rest of the body; if it is breath, it will perhaps be scattered; if fire, it will be quenched; if it is the harmony of Aristoxenus, it will be dissolved. What shall I say of Dicaearchus, who says the soul is nothing at all? On all these opinions, nothing after death can concern anyone; for sensation is lost together with life, and to one who does not feel there is nothing in any respect that can matter. The opinions of the rest bring hope — if perchance this delights you — that souls, when they have departed from their bodies, can come into heaven as into their own dwelling. — It does indeed delight me, and I should wish first that it be so, and then, even if it be not so, that I might still be persuaded of it. — What need, then, have you of our help? Can we outdo Plato in eloquence? Unroll his book on the soul with care: you will desire nothing further. — I have done so, by Hercules, and indeed more than once; but somehow, while I read, I assent; when I have laid down the book and begun to reflect by myself on the immortality of souls, all that assent slips away. — What?

do you grant this — that either souls remain after death, or perish in death itself? — I grant it. — What, if they remain? — I allow them to be happy. — But if they perish? — That they are not wretched, since they do not even exist; for that we were forced by you to grant a little while ago. — How, then, or why do you say that death seems an evil to you, when it will either make us happy if our souls remain, or, if we lack sensation, at least not wretched?

— Set forth, then, if it is no trouble, first, if you can, that souls remain after death; then, if you fail in that — for it is hard — you will show that death is free from every evil. For this very thing I fear may be an evil: not, I say, to lack sensation, but to have to lack it. — As authorities for the view you wish to be upheld, we can use the best — which in all cases both ought to and is wont to have the greatest weight — and first of all the whole of antiquity, which, the nearer it stood to its origin and divine descent, the better, perhaps, it discerned those things that were true. And so this one belief was implanted in those men of old, whom Ennius calls the "ancients" (casci): that there is sensation in death, and that a man is not so blotted out by his departure from life as to perish utterly;

and this may be understood from many other things, but above all from the law of the pontiffs and from the rites of sepulchres, which men endowed with the greatest abilities would neither have tended with such care, nor sanctioned the violation of with so inexpiable a religious awe, had it not been fixed in their minds that death is not a destruction wiping out and blotting out all things, but rather a kind of migration and change of life, which in famous men and women was wont to be a guide to heaven, while in the rest it was held to earth and yet remained.

From this, and by the belief of our own people, Romulus dwells in heaven and passes his days with the gods, as Ennius said, assenting to the common report; and among the Greeks, and thence passed down to us and even as far as the Ocean, Hercules is held so great and so present a god; from this Liber, son of Semele, was born, and with the same celebrity of report the brothers, sons of Tyndareus, who are reported to have been not only helpers of the Roman people's victory in battles, but even messengers of it. What? Is not Ino, daughter of Cadmus, called Leucothea by the Greeks and held to be Matuta by ours? What? Is not nearly the whole of heaven — not to pursue more — filled with the human race?

Indeed, if I should set myself to search out ancient things and to dig out from them what the writers of Greece have handed down, those very gods who are accounted of the greater nations will be found to have set out from here into heaven. Inquire whose tombs are pointed out in Greece; call to mind, since you have been initiated, what is handed down in the mysteries: then at last you will understand how widely this extends. But those who had not yet learned that natural philosophy which men began to handle many years afterwards had persuaded themselves only of as much as they had come to know at nature's prompting; they did not grasp the reasons and causes of things, and were often moved by certain apparitions, and these especially by night, so that those who had departed from life seemed to them to be living.

And as this seems the strongest proof brought forward why we should believe that gods exist — that there is no race so savage, no man of all so brutish, whose mind has not been imbued with a belief in the gods (many hold wrong notions about the gods — for that is wont to come about through depraved custom — yet all judge that there is a divine power and nature; and this no conference of men or coming-together brought about, the belief was not confirmed by institutions nor by laws; but in every matter the agreement of all nations must be reckoned a law of nature) — who, then, is there who does not lament the death of his own first on this ground, that he thinks them bereft of the comforts of life? Take away this belief, and you will have taken away mourning. For no one grieves at his own discomfort: men feel pain, perhaps, and are troubled, but that mournful lamentation and grieving weeping comes from this, that we think the one we loved to be deprived of the comforts of life and to be aware of it. And this we feel so by nature's lead, with no reasoning, no instruction. But the greatest proof is that nature herself gives silent judgement on the immortality of souls, in that all men care, and care greatly, for what is to be after their death. A man "plants trees to profit another age," as Statius says in the Synephebi — with what aim, save that he too believes that ages to come concern him? Will, then, the careful farmer plant trees whose berry he himself will never look upon, and the great man not plant laws, institutions, a commonwealth? What does the begetting of children mean, what the propagation of one's name, what the adoptions of sons, what the care over wills, what the very monuments and epitaphs of tombs, save that we think upon the future too? — What?

do you doubt that a pattern of nature ought to be taken from each best nature? What nature, then, is better in the human race than that of those who think themselves born to help, protect, and preserve their fellow men? Hercules has departed to the gods: he would never have departed had he not, while he was among men, paved that road for himself. These are old things by now, and hallowed by the religion of all men: what do we think those many and great men in this commonwealth had in mind, who were slain for the commonwealth's sake? That their name should be bounded by the same limits as their life? No one ever, without a great hope of immortality, would offer himself to death for his country.

Themistocles might have lived at leisure, Epaminondas might, and — not to seek old and foreign examples — I myself might; but somehow there clings in our minds, as it were, a certain foreboding of ages to come, and this both arises most strongly and appears most readily in the greatest geniuses and the loftiest souls. Take this away, and who would be so mad as to live ever amid toils and dangers?

I speak of leading men. What? Do not poets too wish to be ennobled after death? Whence, then, comes that line: "Behold, O citizens, the figure of old Ennius's likeness: he it was who set forth your fathers' mightiest deeds"? He demands the reward of glory from those whose fathers his glory had ennobled; and the same poet: "Let none honour me with tears" — why? — "I fly, living, on the lips of men." But why poets? Even craftsmen wish to be ennobled after death. For why did Phidias enclose a likeness of himself in the shield of Minerva, when it was not permitted to inscribe his name? What? Do not our philosophers inscribe their own names on the very books they write about despising glory?

But if the agreement of all is the voice of nature, and all men everywhere agree that there is something which concerns those who have passed from life, we too must judge the same; and if we shall hold that those whose souls excel either in genius or in virtue, because they are of the best nature, most discern the power of nature, it is likely — since each best man most serves posterity — that there is something of which he is to have awareness after death.

But just as we believe by nature that gods exist, and by reason come to know of what kind they are, so we judge by the consent of all nations that souls endure, while in what abode they remain and of what kind they are must be learned by reason. The ignorance of this fashioned the world below and those terrors which you seemed, not without cause, to despise. For since bodies fall to the earth and are covered with earth — whence comes the word "to inter" (humari) — men supposed that the remaining life of the dead was passed beneath the earth; and great errors followed upon this opinion, which the poets enlarged.

For the crowded assembly of the theatre, in which there are women and boys, is moved on hearing so grand a song: "I am here, and I come from Acheron by a high and hard road scarce passable, through caverns built of rough hanging rocks, vast, where rigid, thick gloom of the dead stands fast" — and so great was the error (which to me at least now seems removed) that, though they knew bodies were burned, yet they imagined things to take place in the world below which could neither happen nor be conceived without bodies. For they could not grasp with the mind souls living by themselves, and so sought some form and figure for them. Hence the whole Necyia of Homer; hence those rites of calling up the dead (necyomanteia) which my friend Appius used to perform; hence, in our own neighbourhood, the lake of Avernus, "whence souls are summoned, wrapped in dim shade, images of the dead, by the deep gateway of Acheron, with salt blood." Yet they would have these images speak, which can be done neither without tongue, nor palate, nor the force and shape of throat, sides, and lungs. For they could see nothing with the mind; they referred all things to the eyes.

But it is the mark of a great genius to call the mind away from the senses and to lead thought from habit. And so I believe that others too, in all those ages, held it; but, as far as is recorded in writing, Pherecydes of Syros first said that the souls of men are everlasting — an ancient indeed, for he lived in the reign of my own kinsman. His disciple Pythagoras confirmed this opinion most of all; who, having come into Italy in the reign of Tarquinius Superbus, held that Great Greece in his grip both by his teaching and by his authority, and for many ages thereafter the name of the Pythagoreans so flourished that no others seemed learned. But I return to the ancients. They gave, for the most part, no reason for their opinion, unless something had to be explained by numbers or diagrams:

they say that Plato came into Italy to acquaint himself with the Pythagoreans, and learned all things Pythagorean, and was the first not only to hold the same view as Pythagoras concerning the eternity of souls, but also to bring forward a reason for it. This reason, unless you object, let us pass over, and let us leave aside this whole hope of immortality. — What? Having raised me to the highest expectation, will you forsake me? By Hercules, I had rather err with Plato — whom I know how highly you esteem, and whom from your own mouth I admire — than hold true opinions with those men.

— Well said, and a blessing on your spirit! For I myself would not unwillingly err with that very man. Do we doubt, then —? Or shall we, as in most matters? And yet in this least of all; for the mathematicians persuade us that the earth, set in the middle of the universe, holds, in relation to the embrace of the whole heaven, the place as it were of a point, which they call kentron; and further, that the nature of the four bodies which generate all things is such that, as though they had their impulses parted and divided among them, the earthy and the moist by their own inclination and weight are borne at equal angles into the earth and into the sea, while the two remaining parts, the one fiery, the other belonging to soul (or air), as the former two are borne by their gravity and weight into the middle place of the universe, so these in turn fly up by straight lines into the heavenly region — either because nature itself seeks the higher, or because the lighter are by their nature repelled by the heavier. Since these things stand fast, it ought to be evident that souls, when they have departed from the body — whether they be of breath, that is, airy, or fiery — are borne aloft.

But if indeed the soul is a kind of number — which is said more subtly than clearly — or that fifth nature, more unnamed than ununderstood, then they are far more unmixed and pure, so that they raise themselves the furthest from the earth. Some one of these, then, the soul is, lest so vigorous a mind should lie sunk either in the heart or the brain, or in the Empedoclean blood. Dicaearchus, indeed, together with his contemporary and fellow-pupil Aristoxenus — both learned men, surely — let us pass over; of whom the one seems never even to have suffered pain, since he does not feel that he has a soul, while the other so delights in his own music that he tries to transfer it even to these matters. But harmony we can recognize from the intervals of sounds, whose various combination produces also several harmonies; how, however, the arrangement of the limbs and the shape of the body, void of soul, could produce harmony, I do not see. But let him, learned as he indeed is, yield these matters to his master Aristotle, and teach singing himself; for that Greek proverb gives good counsel: "Let each man practise the art he knows."

But let us cast out altogether that chance concourse of smooth and round indivisible bodies, which Democritus nonetheless will have to be warmed and breathing, that is, animate. That soul, now, which — if it is of these four kinds, of which all things are said to consist — is composed of inflamed breath (as I see it seems best to Panaetius above all), must of necessity make for the upper regions. For these two kinds have nothing that bends downward, and ever seek the heights. Thus, whether they are scattered, this happens far from the earth, or whether they remain and keep their condition, all the more must they be borne to heaven, and by them be broken through and parted this thick and dense air which is nearest to the earth. For the soul is warmer, or rather more burning, than this air which I just now called thick and dense; and this can be known from the fact that our bodies, made up of the earthy kind of elements, are warmed by the heat of the soul.

There is the further point, that the soul escapes the more easily out of this air which I now so often name, and breaks through it, because nothing is swifter than the soul, and there is no speed which can vie with the soul's speed. And if it remains uncorrupted and like itself, it must needs be borne in such a way as to penetrate and part all this heaven, in which the clouds, rains, and winds are gathered, which is both moist and dark on account of the exhalations of the earth. When the soul has surmounted this region and reached and recognized a nature like its own, it comes to rest amid fires composed of fine air and the tempered heat of the sun, and makes an end of raising itself higher. For when it has attained a lightness and warmth like its own, then, as though balanced by equal weights, it is moved in no direction, and that at last is its natural seat, when it has penetrated to its like; in which, wanting nothing, it will be nourished and sustained by the same things by which the stars are sustained and nourished. And since we are wont to be inflamed by the torches of the body to nearly all desires, and to be the more kindled because we vie with those who have what we desire to have, surely we shall be happy when, our bodies left behind, we are free of both desires and rivalries;

and what we now do, when we are unbent from our cares, in wishing to behold and survey something — that we shall then do far more freely, and we shall set our whole selves to contemplating and discerning things, because there is by nature in our minds a certain insatiable desire to see the truth, and the very borders of those regions, when we shall have come to them, will give us a knowledge of heavenly things the easier, and so the greater desire of knowing.

For this beauty, even on earth, stirred up that philosophy, "ancestral and inherited from our forefathers," as Theophrastus says, kindled by the desire of knowledge. But they will most of all enjoy it who, even when, dwelling on this earth, they were wrapped about with darkness, yet longed to discern things with the keen edge of the mind. For if those think they attain something now who have seen the mouth of the Pontus and those straits through which passed the ship named Argo, "because chosen Argive men sailed in her to seek the golden fleece of the ram," or those who have seen those straits of Ocean "where the ravening wave divides Europe and Libya" — what spectacle, pray, do we think it will be, when it shall be permitted to behold the whole earth, both its situation, shape, and outline, and likewise its habitable regions and again those left void of all cultivation through the force of cold or of heat?

For not even now do we discern with the eyes the things we see; for there is no sensation in the body, but, as not only the natural philosophers teach but also the physicians, who have seen these things laid open and exposed, there are, as it were, certain channels pierced from the seat of the soul to the eyes, the ears, the nostrils. And so often, hindered either by thought or by some force of disease, with eyes and ears open and unimpaired we neither see nor hear, so that it may readily be understood that it is the soul that both sees and hears, and not those parts which are, as it were, the windows of the soul, through which nonetheless the mind can perceive nothing unless it be active and present. What of this, that with the same mind we apprehend things most unlike — colour, taste, heat, smell, sound? These the soul could never know by its five messengers, unless all things were referred to it, and it alone were the judge of all. And surely those things will then be discerned far purer and clearer, when the soul, set free, has arrived whither nature bears it.

For now, although nature has fashioned with the most cunning craftsmanship those openings which lie open to the soul from the body, yet they are in a manner fenced off by earthy and dense bodies; but when there shall be nothing except the soul, no object set in its way will hinder it from perceiving of what sort each thing is. Copiously, were the matter to demand it, we might tell how many, how various, how great are the spectacles the soul will have in the heavenly regions.

Reflecting on which, I am often wont to marvel at the insolence of certain philosophers, who admire the knowledge of nature and exultantly give thanks to its discoverer and founder, and worship him as a god; for they say that through him they have been freed from the most grievous masters, from everlasting terror and from fear by day and night. From what terror? From what fear? What old woman is so doting as to fear those things which, forsooth, you would fear, had you not learned natural philosophy — "the Acherontian halls, the deep regions of Orcus, pale, the places clouded with darkness"? Is the philosopher not ashamed to glory in this, that he does not fear these things and that he has learned them to be false? From which it may be understood how acute they are by nature, since without instruction they would have believed these things.

But some fine thing, forsooth, they have attained, in having learned that, when the time of death comes, they will wholly perish. And granting it be so — for I do not contend — what is there in this matter either to gladden or to glory in? Nor, however, does anything occur to me at all why the opinion of Pythagoras and Plato should not be true. For though Plato brought no reason at all — see what I grant the man! — he would overcome me by his very authority: but he brought so many reasons that he plainly seems to have wished to persuade others, and certainly to have persuaded himself.

But very many strive against this, and condemn souls to death as though sentenced on a capital charge; nor is there any other reason why the eternity of souls should seem incredible to them, save that they cannot understand or grasp in thought what the soul is when void of body. As if, forsooth, they understood what it is within the body itself — what its conformation, what its magnitude, what its place; so that, if everything which is now hidden in the living man could be discerned, it is a question whether the soul would fall under sight, or whether its fineness is such that it escapes the keenness of the eye.

Let those reflect on this who deny that they can understand the soul without a body: they will see what soul they understand within the body itself. To me, indeed, gazing on the nature of the soul, a far more difficult reflection presents itself, far more obscure: of what sort the soul is within the body, as in a strange house, than of what sort it is when it has gone forth and come into the free heaven as into its own home. For if we cannot understand of what sort a thing is which we have never seen, surely we can grasp in thought both God himself and the divine soul freed from the body. Dicaearchus and Aristoxenus, because it was hard to understand what the soul was or of what sort, said there was no soul at all.

That, indeed, is perhaps the greatest thing — to see the soul with the soul itself; and doubtless this is the force of Apollo's precept, by which he counsels each man to know himself. For I do not believe he gives this counsel that we should know our limbs or stature or shape; nor are we bodies, nor, in saying these things to you, do I speak to your body. When, therefore, he says "Know thyself," he says this: "Know thy soul." For the body is, as it were, a vessel or a kind of receptacle of the soul; whatever is done by your soul is done by you. To know this soul, then, unless it were a divine thing, would not have been a precept of some keener mind, ascribed to a god.

But if the soul itself shall not know of what sort the soul is, tell me, I pray, will it not know even that it exists, nor that it is moved? From this arose that reasoning of Plato's, which was explained by Socrates in the Phaedrus, and which I set down in the sixth book of my Republic: "That which is ever moved is eternal; but that which imparts motion to something, and is itself stirred from elsewhere, must needs, when it has an end of motion, have an end of living. Only that, then, which moves itself, because it is never forsaken by itself, never even ceases to be moved; nay, for the rest of things that are moved, this is the source, this the first principle of motion.

But of a first principle there is no origin; for from a first principle all things arise, while it itself can be born of nothing else; for that would not be a first principle which were begotten from elsewhere. And if it never arises, neither does it ever perish; for a first principle, once extinguished, will neither be reborn itself from another nor create another from itself, since all things must needs arise from a first principle. So it comes about that the source of motion is in that which is moved by itself; and this can neither be born nor die — else the whole heaven and all nature must collapse and come to a stand, nor gain any force by which, struck at the first, it might be moved. Since, then, it is plain that that is eternal which moves itself, who is there who would deny that this nature has been given to souls? For everything that is stirred by an outward impulse is soulless; but that which is animate is set in motion by an inner motion of its own; for this is the proper nature and power of the soul. And if this is the one thing of all that moves itself,

surely it was not born and is eternal." Let all the plebeian philosophers run together — for so those seem to be called who dissent from Plato and Socrates and that household — not only will they never explain anything so elegantly, but they will not even understand how subtly this conclusion has been drawn. The soul, then, feels that it is moved; and when it feels this, it feels at the same time that it is moved by its own force, not another's, and that it cannot come about that it should ever be forsaken by itself. From this follows eternity — unless you have something to say to this. — For my part I would readily have allowed nothing even to come into my mind against it; so far do I favour that opinion. — What?

do you think those proofs lighter which show that there is something divine in the souls of men? If I discerned how these could come into being, I should also see how they perish. For blood, bile, phlegm, bones, sinews, veins — in short, the whole figure of the limbs and of the entire body — I think I can say whence they are compounded and how they are made: but the soul itself — if there were nothing in it save that we live by it, I should think man's life sustained by nature as a vine's is, or a tree's; for these too we say "live." Likewise, if the soul of man had nothing save that it should seek or shun, that too would be common to it with the beasts.

First, it has memory, and that an infinite one, of countless things. This Plato will have to be a recollection of a former life. For in that book which is entitled Meno, Socrates asks a certain little boy some questions of geometry about the measuring of a square. To these he answers as a boy would, and yet the questions are so easy that, answering step by step, he arrives at the same point as if he had learned geometry. From this Socrates wishes it to follow that to learn is nothing else than to recollect. This passage he explains far more carefully in that discourse which he held on the very day on which he departed from life; for he shows that anyone whatever, however ignorant of all things he may seem, declares, in answering one who questions him well, that he does not then learn those things, but recognizes them by recollection; and that it can in no way come to pass that from boyhood we should have so many notions of so many great matters implanted and, as it were, sealed up in our souls — which they call ennoiai — unless the soul, before it had entered into the body, had flourished in the knowledge of things.

And since nothing is (as Plato everywhere argues — for he thinks nothing exists which arises and perishes, and that that alone exists which is ever such as it is: he calls it idea, we species) — the soul, shut up in the body, could not recognize these things, but brought a knowledge of them with it; whereby the wonder at the knowledge of so many things is taken away. Nor does the soul see them plainly when it has suddenly migrated into so unwonted and so disordered a dwelling; but when it has collected and recovered itself, then it recognizes them by recollection.

So to learn is nothing else than to recollect. — But I, for my part, marvel at memory in a still greater way. For what is that by which we remember, or what power has it, or whence is it sprung? I do not ask how great a memory Simonides is said to have had, how great Theodectes, how great Cineas, who was sent as envoy by Pyrrhus to the senate, how great Charmadas lately, how great Metrodorus of Scepsis, who lived but recently, how great our own Hortensius: I speak of the common memory of men, and chiefly of those who are engaged in some greater study and art, the greatness of whose minds it is hard to judge — so many things do they remember.

To what, then, does this discourse tend? I think we must understand what that power is and whence it is. Surely it is neither of the heart, nor of the blood, nor of the brain, nor of atoms; whether it is of breath or of fire I do not know, nor am I ashamed, like those men, to confess that I do not know what I do not know: but this — if of any other obscure matter I could affirm anything — whether the soul be breath or fire, I would swear it to be divine. For, I beseech you, does so great a power of memory seem to you to be either sown or compounded out of earth, under this misty and murky sky? If you do not see what this is, yet you see of what sort it is; and if not even that, yet assuredly you see how great it is.

What, then? Do we suppose there is some capacity in the soul, into which, as into some vessel, the things we remember are poured? That, indeed, is absurd; for what bottom, or what such figure of the soul, can be understood, or what capacity at all so great? Or do we suppose the soul to be stamped, as it were like wax, and that memory is the traces of things imprinted upon the mind? What can be the traces of words, what of the things themselves; and what, further, so boundless a magnitude as could shape forth all those many things? — What?

what, pray, is that power which investigates hidden things, which is called invention and excogitation? Does even it seem to you compounded out of this earthy, mortal, and perishable nature? Or he who first imposed names on all things — which Pythagoras held to be the mark of the highest wisdom? Or he who gathered together scattered men and summoned them to the fellowship of life? Or he who bounded the sounds of the voice, which seemed infinite, by a few letter-marks? Or he who noted the courses, advances, and stations of the wandering stars? All these were great; and greater still were those earlier men who discovered crops, clothing, dwellings, the ordering of life, defences against wild beasts — by whom we, tamed and refined, glided from the necessary crafts to the more elegant. For both a great delight has been won for the ears by the discovered and tempered variety and nature of sounds, and we have looked up at the stars, both those fixed in their set places and those that wander not in fact but in name; and he who beheld in his mind their revolutions and all their motions showed that his own soul was like the soul of him who had fashioned them in the heaven.

For when Archimedes bound up in a sphere the motions of the moon, sun, and the five wandering stars, he brought about the same thing as he who, in the Timaeus, built the world — Plato's god — namely, that one revolution should govern motions most unlike in slowness and swiftness. And if in this world this cannot happen without a god, neither could Archimedes have imitated the same motions in a sphere without divine genius.

To me, indeed, not even these more familiar and more illustrious things seem to lack divine power — so that I cannot think that either the poet pours forth a weighty and full song without some heavenly inspiration of the mind, or that eloquence flows abundantly, with sounding words and rich thoughts, without some greater power. As for philosophy, the mother of all the arts, what is it but, as Plato says, the gift, or, as I say, the invention of the gods? This first trained us to their worship, then to the law of men which lies in the fellowship of the human race, then to moderation and greatness of soul; and the same drove the mist from the soul as from the eyes, that we might see all things — above and below, first and last and middle.

Altogether this seems to me a divine power, which accomplishes things so many and so great. For what is the memory of things and words? What, further, is invention? Surely it is that than which nothing greater can be understood even in God. For I do not think the gods rejoice in ambrosia or nectar, or in Youth serving the cups; nor do I listen to Homer, who says Ganymede was carried off by the gods for his beauty, to serve Jove his drink: no just cause why so great a wrong should be done to Laomedon. Homer feigned these things and transferred human matters to the gods: I would rather he had transferred divine things to us. But what are the divine things? To be vigorous, to be wise, to discover, to remember. Therefore the soul which... — as I say — is divine; as Euripides dares to say, is a god. And indeed, if God is either breath or fire, the soul of man is the same. For as that heavenly nature is free of earth and of moisture, so the human soul is void of both these things; but if there is a certain fifth nature, first introduced by Aristotle, this belongs both to the gods and to souls. Following this opinion, we expressed it in these very words in the Consolation:

"No origin of souls can be found upon the earth; for there is nothing in souls mixed and compounded, or that seems born and fashioned out of earth, nothing either moist or airy or fiery. For in these natures there is nothing which has the power of memory, mind, and thought, which both holds the past and foresees the future and can embrace the present. These things alone are divine, nor will it ever be found whence they can come to man save from God. There is, therefore, a certain singular nature and power of the soul, set apart from these usual and known natures. So whatever it is that feels, that is wise, that lives, that is vigorous, it must needs be heavenly and divine, and for that reason eternal. Nor indeed can God himself, as he is understood by us, be understood in any other way than as a certain mind unbound and free, severed from all mortal compounding, perceiving and moving all things, and itself endowed with everlasting motion. Of this kind and of this same nature is the human mind." Where, then, or of what sort is that mind?

— And where or of what sort is yours? Can you say? Or, if I do not have for understanding all the things I should wish to have, shall I not even be permitted to use, through you, the things I do have? The soul is not strong enough to see itself; but, like the eye, the soul, not seeing itself, discerns other things. It does not see — what is of least account — its own shape (though perhaps even that, but let us leave it aside); its power, certainly, its keenness, its memory, its motion, its swiftness it does see. These are great, these are divine, these are everlasting; but of what face it is, or where it dwells, we need not even inquire.

As when we behold, first, the splendour and brightness of the heaven; then the swiftness of its revolution, so great that we cannot conceive it; then the alternations of days and nights and the fourfold changes of the seasons, fitted for the ripening of crops and the tempering of bodies, and the sun, the governor and guide of all these; and the moon, by the increase and diminution of its light, marking and signifying the days as in a calendar; then, in the same circle parted into twelve divisions, the five stars borne on, keeping their same courses most constantly with motions unequal among themselves; and the nocturnal form of the heaven adorned on every side with stars; then the globe of the earth standing out from the sea, fixed in the central place of the whole universe, habitable and cultivated in two distant zones, of which the one, that we inhabit, "lying beneath the Pole toward the seven stars, whence the shuddering howl of the North Wind drives the icy snows," the other, southern, unknown to us, which the Greeks call

antichthon ("the opposite earth"); the remaining parts uncultivated, because they are either stiff with cold or scorched with heat. But here, where we dwell, there fails not, each in its season, "the sky to grow bright, the trees to put forth leaves, the gladdening vines to swell with tendrils, the boughs to bow with abundance of berries, the cornfields to lavish their fruits, all things to bloom, the springs to gush, the meadows to be clothed with grasses"; then the multitude of cattle, some for food, some for the tilling of the fields, some for carrying, some for clothing our bodies; and man himself, as it were the beholder of the heaven and the worshipper of the gods, and all the fields and seas

obedient to man's use: when we discern these things, then, and others past number, can we doubt that some one presides over them — either a maker, if these things came into being, as Plato thinks, or, if they always existed, as Aristotle holds, a governor of so great a work and charge? So the mind of man, though you do not see it, as you do not see God, yet, as you recognize God from his works, so from the memory of things, and invention, and swiftness of motion, and all the beauty of virtue, recognize the divine power of the mind. In what place, then, is it? In the head, I believe, and I can bring a reason why I so believe. But another time, where the soul is; certainly it is within you. What is its nature? Its own, I think, and proper to itself. But grant it be fiery, grant it airy: that is nothing to the matter we treat of. This only mark: that, as you know God, although you are ignorant both of his place and of his face, so your soul ought to be known to you, even though you are ignorant both of its place and of its form.

But concerning the knowledge of the soul we cannot doubt — unless we are utterly leaden in natural philosophy — that there is nothing mixed in souls, nothing compounded, nothing coupled, nothing cemented together, nothing twofold: and since this is so, surely it can neither be sundered, nor divided, nor torn apart, nor drawn asunder, nor, therefore, can it perish. For perishing is, as it were, the departure and separation and parting of those parts which before the perishing were held by some union. Led by these and like reasons, Socrates neither sought an advocate for his trial on a capital charge, nor was a suppliant to his judges, but maintained a free defiance springing from greatness of soul, not from pride; and on the last day of his life he discoursed much on this very theme; and a few days before, when he could easily have been led out of prison, he would not; and then, when he already held in his hand almost that death-bearing cup, he spoke in such a way that he seemed not to be thrust down to death, but to ascend into heaven.

For so he thought, and so he discoursed, that there are two roads and twofold courses for souls departing from the body: for those who had defiled themselves with human vices and given themselves wholly to lusts, by which, blinded, they had stained themselves either with private vices and disgraces, or had conceived inexpiable frauds by the wronging of the commonwealth — for these there is a certain devious path, shut off from the council of the gods; but those who had kept themselves whole and chaste, and had had the least contagion with their bodies, and had ever called themselves away from them, and, while in human bodies, had imitated the life of the gods — for these the return to those from whom they had set out lies easily open.

And so he relates that, just as swans — who are dedicated to Apollo not without cause, but because they seem to have from him a power of divination, by which, foreseeing what good there is in death, they die with song and pleasure — so all good and learned men ought to do. (Nor indeed could anyone doubt of this, were it not that the same thing happens to us reflecting carefully on the soul as often befalls those who gaze keenly with their eyes on the failing sun, so that they lose their sight altogether: so the keen edge of the mind, gazing on itself, sometimes grows dull, and for that cause we lose our diligence in contemplating. And so, doubting, looking about, hesitating, fearing many things against us, our discourse is borne along

as on a raft upon a boundless sea.) But these are old things, and from the Greeks; Cato, however, so departed from life that he rejoiced to have found a cause for dying. For that god who rules within us forbids us to depart hence without his bidding; but when the god himself has given a just cause — as then to Socrates, now to Cato, and often to many — then surely, by God of Faith, the wise man will gladly pass from this darkness into yonder light, nor yet will he break the chains of his prison — for the laws forbid — but, as if summoned and sent forth by a magistrate or by some lawful authority, so he will go forth, called and released by God. For the whole life of philosophers, as the same Socrates says, is a meditation upon death.

For what else do we do when we call the soul away from pleasure — that is, from the body — from the household estate, which is the body's servant and handmaid, from the commonwealth, from all business? What, I say, do we then do but summon the soul to itself, compel it to be with itself, and draw it most of all away from the body? But to sever the soul from the body is nothing else than to learn to die. Wherefore let us, believe me, practise this, and disjoin ourselves from our bodies — that is, let us grow accustomed to dying. This, both while we are on earth, will be like that heavenly life, and when, released from these chains, we shall be borne yonder, the course of our souls will be the less retarded. For those who have ever been in the fetters of the body, even when they are loosed, advance the more slowly, like men who have been bound with iron for many years. When we have come thither, then at last we shall live. For this present life is death, which I could lament, if I chose. — You have lamented it enough in your Consolation;

when I read it, I desire nothing more than to leave these things behind; but now, having heard these things, far more. — A time will come, and that swiftly, whether you draw back or hasten; for our age flies. But so far is death from being an evil, as it lately seemed to you, that I fear there is nothing else not an evil more surely for man, nothing else a good more to be preferred, if indeed we are to be either gods ourselves or with the gods. — What does it matter? For there are present some who do not approve of these things. — But I will never dismiss you from this discourse in such a way that on any reasoning death can seem to you an evil. — How can it, when I have learned these things? — How can it, you ask?

Throngs of those who argue the contrary come against us — and not only the Epicureans, whom I for my part do not despise, but somehow each most learned man — and most sharply of all my favourite, Dicaearchus, has argued against this immortality. For he wrote three books, which are called the Lesbiaci because the conversation is held at Mytilene, in which he wishes to prove that souls are mortal. The Stoics, however, grant us a tenancy, as it were, like that of crows: they say that souls will abide long, but deny that they abide forever. Will you not, then, hear why, even if it be so, death is nonetheless not among evils? — As you please; but no one will dislodge me from immortality. — I praise that, indeed, though one ought not to be too confident in anything;

for we are often moved by something shrewdly concluded, and we waver and change our opinion even in clearer matters; for in these there is some obscurity. If that, then, should happen, let us be armed. — By all means; but I shall take care that it does not happen. — Is there any reason, then, why we should not dismiss our friends the Stoics? — I mean those who say that souls remain when they have departed from the body, but not forever. — Yes, dismiss those who undertake what is hardest in this whole case — that the soul can remain void of the body — but the other point, which is not only easy to believe, but, that being granted which they wish, follows from it, that very point they do not grant: namely that, when it has long remained, it should not perish.

— You reprove them rightly, and the matter stands in that way. Shall we, then, believe Panaetius, when he dissents from his own Plato? For though everywhere he calls him divine, most wise, most holy, the Homer of philosophers, yet this one opinion of his, concerning the immortality of souls, he does not approve. For he holds — what no one denies — that whatever has been born perishes; and that souls are born, which the likeness of those who are begotten declares, a likeness that appears even in dispositions, not only in bodies. He brings, moreover, another reason: that there is nothing which feels pain but can also be sick; and that what falls into sickness will also perish; but souls feel pain, therefore they also perish.

These things can be refuted: for they belong to one who is ignorant that, when we speak of the eternity of souls, it is the mind that is spoken of, which is ever free from all turbid motion, not those parts in which griefs, angers, and lusts are at work — which he, against whom these things are said, thinks set apart and divided from the mind. Again, the likeness appears more in beasts, whose souls are void of reason; but the likeness of men stands out more in the figure of their bodies, and it matters much to the souls themselves in what sort of body they are placed. For many things arise from the body which sharpen the mind, many which dull it. Aristotle indeed says that all men of genius are melancholic — so that I do not take it ill that I am rather slow. He enumerates many, and, as though it were established, brings a reason why this is so. But if there is so great a force toward the disposition of the mind in those things that are begotten in the body — and these, whatever they are, are what produce the likeness — the likeness brings no necessity at all why souls should be born. I pass over the unlikenesses.

I could wish Panaetius were here — he lived with Africanus — that I might ask of him whose among his kin was that great-nephew of Africanus's brother like, who in face was like his father, but in life so like all the most abandoned men that he was easily the basest; like, also, the grandson of Publius Crassus, a man both wise and eloquent and foremost, and the grandsons and sons of many other famous men, whom it is needless to name. But what are we about? Have we forgotten that this is what we now proposed to ourselves — that, when we had said enough about eternity, even if souls should perish, there is no evil in death? — I had indeed remembered, but while you were speaking of eternity I gladly suffered you to wander from the proposal.

— I see that you look on high and wish to migrate into heaven. I hope it may be ours to attain it. But suppose, as those men will have it, that souls do not remain after death: I see that, if it be so, we are deprived of the hope of a happier life; but what evil does that opinion bring? For grant that the soul perishes as the body does: is there, then, any pain, or any sensation at all in the body after death? No one says that — though Epicurus charges it upon Democritus, the Democriteans deny it. Neither, then, does sensation remain in the soul; for the soul itself is nowhere. Where, then, is the evil, since there is no third thing? Is it because the very departure of the soul from the body does not come about without pain? Even if I should believe it to be so, how slight a thing it is! But I think it false, and for the most part it comes about without sensation, sometimes even with pleasure; and the whole thing is slight, whatever it be;

for it comes about in a point of time. What gnaws, or rather tortures, is the departure from all those things which are good in life. — See whether it may not more truly be said, from the evils. Why should I now lament the life of men? Truly and justly I might; but what need is there, when my aim is that we should not think we shall be wretched after death, to make life too more wretched by bewailing it? I did this in that book in which I consoled my very self, as much as I could. From evils, then, death takes us away, not from goods — if we seek the truth. And indeed this is so copiously argued by Hegesias the Cyrenaic that he is said to have been forbidden by King Ptolemy to say those things in the schools, because many, on hearing him, made away with themselves.

There is, moreover, that epigram of Callimachus upon Theombrotus of Ambracia, who, he says, though nothing adverse had befallen him, cast himself from the wall into the sea, after reading a book of Plato. But there is a book by that Hegesias I mentioned, the Apokarteron ("The Man Starving Himself to Death"), in which a man departing from life by abstinence is called back by his friends; answering whom, he enumerates the discomforts of human life. I could do the same — though less than he, who thinks it expedient for no one at all to live. I pass over others: is it even expedient for us? We who, bereft of both our domestic and our public comforts and adornments, surely, had we perished earlier, death would have drawn us away from evils, not from goods.

Let there be, then, someone who has no evil, who has received no wound from fortune: that famous Metellus, with his four honoured sons, or Priam with his fifty, of whom seventeen were born of his lawful wife; in both fortune had the same power, but she used it in the one. For Metellus his many sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, laid upon the pyre; Priam, bereft of so great an offspring, when he had fled to the altar, an enemy's hand slew. Had he, with his sons living and his kingdom safe, perished — "amid embossed and panelled roofs, with barbaric wealth standing by" — would he then have departed from goods or from evils? Then assuredly he would seem to have departed from goods. But certainly it would have fallen out better for him, nor would those things be sung so tearfully: "All these things I saw set aflame, Priam's life by violence reft away, Jove's altar fouled with blood." As though, forsooth, anything better could then have befallen him by that violence! But had he perished earlier, he would have escaped that issue altogether; as it was, at that time he lost the sensation of his evils.

For our friend Pompeius, when he was grievously sick at Naples, things took a turn for the better. The Neapolitans were crowned with garlands, and so, no doubt, were the Puteolans; from the towns the people offered public congratulations — a silly business, surely, and a bit Greekish, but fortunate nonetheless. Whether, then, had he been extinguished at that time, would he have departed from good things or from evil ones? Certainly from wretched ones. For he would not have waged war with his father-in-law; he would not have taken up arms unprepared; he would not have left his home; he would not have fled from Italy; he would not, his army lost, have fallen, defenceless, upon the sword and hands of slaves; his children would not have been mourned, nor all his fortunes possessed by the victors. He who, had he met death then, would have died amid the amplest fortunes — by the prolonging of his life how many, how great, how incredible calamities he drained! These things are escaped by death, even if they have not come to pass; yet, because they can come to pass — but men do not reflect that these things can befall them: each man hopes for the fortune of Metellus for himself, just as though either the fortunate were more in number than the unhappy, or there were anything certain in human affairs, or to hope were wiser than to fear. But grant even this very thing — that men are deprived by death of good things:

do the dead, then, also lack the comforts of life, and is this wretched? Surely they must say so. But can he who does not exist lack anything at all? For the very word "to lack" is a sad one, because this notion underlies it: he had, he has not; he longs for, seeks again, is in want. These, I suppose, are the discomforts of one who lacks: he lacks eyes — hateful blindness; children — childlessness. This holds among the living; but of the dead not only does no one lack the comforts of life, but not even life itself. I speak of the dead, who do not exist: do we, who do exist, lack horns or wings? Would anyone say so? Surely no one. Why so? Because, when you do not have a thing which is fitted to you neither by use nor by nature, you do not "lack" it, even if you feel that you do not have it.

This must be pressed again and again and urged home, once that point is firmly established about which, if souls are mortal, we cannot doubt — namely, that so great a destruction is in death that not even the slightest trace of sensation is left. This, then, being well settled and fixed, that other point must be shaken out, so that it may be known what "to lack" is, lest some remnant of error be left in the word. "To lack," then, signifies this: to be without that which you would wish to have; for there is willing inherent in lacking — except when it is said in some other sense of the word, as in a fever. For it is said in another way too: to lack, when you do not have a thing and feel that you do not have it, even though you bear it lightly. So "lacking" is not spoken of in death; for then there would be nothing to grieve at. That is spoken of: to lack a good, which is an evil. But not even a living man lacks a good, if he does not need it; yet in a living man it can still be understood that you "lack" a kingdom — though this cannot be said of you with sufficient nicety; it could be said of Tarquinius, when he was driven from his kingdom — but in a dead man it cannot even be understood. For "lacking" belongs to one who feels; and there is no sensation in the dead: therefore there is not even "lacking" in the dead. — And yet, what need is there to philosophize on this point, when we see that the matter has no great need of philosophy?

How often have not only our commanders, but whole armies as well, rushed to a death not doubtful! And if death were feared, Lucius Brutus would not have fallen in battle, barring the return of the tyrant whom he himself had expelled; the elder Decius, fighting with the Latins, his son with the Etruscans, his grandson with Pyrrhus, would not have flung themselves upon the enemy's weapons; Spain would not have seen the Scipios falling for their country in a single war, nor Cannae Paulus and Geminus, Venusia Marcellus, Litana Albinus, Lucania Gracchus. Is any one of these wretched today? Not even at that time, after his last breath; for no one can be wretched when sensation is destroyed.

"But this very thing is hateful — to be without sensation." Hateful, if it were "to lack"; but since it is plain that nothing can be in him who himself does not exist, what can there be hateful in him who neither lacks nor feels? — Although this point is made too often, yet that is because in it lies all the soul's contraction arising from the fear of death. For he who has sufficiently seen — what is clearer than the light — that, soul and body consumed and the whole living being destroyed and a universal perishing wrought, that living thing which once was has become nothing, will plainly perceive that there is no difference between the Hippocentaur, who never existed, and King Agamemnon, and that Marcus Camillus now cares no more about this civil war than I, while he was alive, cared about the capture of Rome. Why, then, should Camillus have grieved, had he thought these things would come to pass some three hundred and fifty years later, and why should I grieve, were I to think that, ten thousand years hence, some nation will get possession of our city? Because the love of country is so great that we measure it not by our own sensation, but by the safety of the country itself. And so death does not deter the wise man,

death which, by reason of uncertain chances, hangs over us daily, and, by reason of the shortness of life, can never be far off — does not deter him from taking thought for the commonwealth and his own for all time, since he counts even posterity, of which he is to have no sensation, as concerning himself. Wherefore a man may, even while judging the soul to be mortal, set about eternal works — not from desire of glory, which he will not feel, but of virtue, which glory necessarily attends, even though you do not pursue it. But if nature is so constituted that, as our birth brings us the beginning of all things, so death brings the end — then, as nothing concerned us before our birth, so nothing will concern us after death. And in this what evil can there be, since death pertains neither to the living nor to the dead?

The latter do not exist; the former it will not touch. Those who make death lighter would have it most like sleep: as though, forsooth, anyone would wish to live ninety years in such a way that, when he had completed sixty, he should sleep out the rest! Not even his own kin would wish that for him, much less he himself. Endymion, indeed — if we are willing to listen to fables — as he fell asleep, I know not when, on Latmos, a mountain of Caria, has not yet, I suppose, awakened. Do you think, then, that he cares when the Moon is in travail, by whom he is supposed to have been lulled to sleep, that she might kiss him sleeping? What should he care, who does not even feel? You have in sleep the image of death, and you put it on daily: and do you doubt that there is no sensation in death, when in its likeness you see there is no sensation?

Let those follies, then, almost old wives' follies, be driven out — that to die before one's time is wretched. What time, pray? That of nature? But she, indeed, gave the use of life as of money, with no fixed day appointed. What, then, is there to complain of, if she demands it back when she will? For on that condition you had received it. The same men, if a little boy dies, think it must be borne with an even mind; if indeed in the cradle, that one must not even complain. And yet from this one nature has exacted more harshly what she had given. "He had not yet tasted," they say, "the sweetness of life"; but this one had already hoped for great things, which he had begun to enjoy. Yet in other matters it is thought better to attain some part than none: why otherwise in life? (Although Callimachus says, not amiss, that Priam wept far oftener than Troilus.) But the fortune of those who die at a full age is praised.

Why? For, I think, to none, were a longer life granted, could it be more pleasant; since surely nothing is sweeter to man than prudence, which old age, to take away all else, assuredly brings. But what age is long, or what is long at all for man? Has not old age, "following close behind, now boys, now youths in their course, overtaken them unawares"? But because we have nothing beyond, we call this long. All these things are called either long or short, just as each was given to each in due proportion. By the river Hypanis, which flows into the Pontus on the European side, Aristotle says certain little creatures are born which live a single day. Of these, then, the one that has died at the eighth hour has died at an advanced age; the one at sunset, decrepit — the more so if even on the day of the solstice. Compare our longest age with eternity: we shall be found in nearly the same brevity as those little creatures.

Let us, then, despise all follies — for what lighter name shall I impose on this lightness? — and let us place the whole power of living well in strength and greatness of soul, in the contempt and disdain of all human things, and in every virtue. For now, indeed, we are made effeminate by the softest reflections, so that, if death come before we have attained the promises of the Chaldaeans, we seem despoiled of certain great goods, deluded and forsaken.

But if by waiting and longing we hang suspended in our minds, are tortured, are troubled — by the immortal gods, how pleasant ought that journey to be, when, once completed, no care, no anxiety will remain! How Theramenes delights me! How lofty is his spirit! For though we weep when we read it, yet that famous man dies not pitiably: who, when cast into prison by order of the Thirty tyrants, had drained the poison like a thirsty man, threw out the rest from the cup so that it rang, and at the sound thus made, smiling, said: "I drink this to the fair Critias" — who had been most foul toward him. For the Greeks are wont at their banquets to name the one to whom they are about to pass the cup. That excellent man jested with his last breath, when he already held the death conceived within his vitals, and truly foretold for him to whom he had drunk the poison's first draught that death which shortly followed. Who would praise this evenness of a most great soul in death itself, if he judged death an evil?

For Socrates goes into the same prison and, a few years later, to the same cup, by the same crime of judges as Theramenes had suffered from the tyrants. What, then, is that discourse which Plato makes him use before the judges when he had already been condemned to death? "A great hope holds me," he said, "O judges, that it goes well with me in being sent to death. For it must needs be one of two things: either that death takes away all sensation altogether, or that there is a migration from these places to some other place. Wherefore, whether sensation is extinguished and death is like that sleep which sometimes, even without the visions of dreams, brings a most peaceful rest — good gods, what gain it is to die! Or how many days can be found that are to be preferred to such a night! And if the whole continuance of all the time that follows is like it, who is happier than I?

But if those things are true which are said — that death is a migration to those shores which they who have departed from life inhabit — that is far happier still. To think that, when you have escaped from those who wish to be reckoned in the number of judges, you should come to those who are truly called judges — Minos, Rhadamanthus, Aeacus, Triptolemus — and meet with those who have lived justly and in good faith — can this journey seem to you a mean one? And to be permitted to converse with Orpheus, Musaeus, Homer, Hesiod — at how much, pray, do you value it? For my part, I would gladly die many times over, if it could be, that I might be permitted to behold the things I speak of. With what delight should I be affected when I met Palamedes, Ajax, and others circumvented by an unjust judgement! I should test, too, the wisdom of the highest king who led the great hosts to Troy, and of Ulysses and Sisyphus; nor, for inquiring into these things, as I did here, should I be condemned to death. — Do not you either, judges who have acquitted me, fear death.

For no evil can befall any good man, living or dead, nor are his affairs ever neglected by the immortal gods, nor has this befallen me by chance. Nor indeed have I anything for which to be angry at those by whom I was accused or condemned, save that they thought to harm me." And these things in this manner; but nothing is better than the close: "But it is now time," he said, "to depart hence — I, that I may die; you, that you may live. But which is better, the immortal gods know; no man, I think, knows." Truly I would by no little prefer this man's spirit to the fortunes of all those who passed judgement upon him — even though that which he denies anyone save the gods to know, he himself knows, namely which is better; for he said so before; but he holds to the last that rule of his, to affirm nothing.

But let us hold to this — that we judge nothing to be an evil which has been given by nature to all, and let us understand that, if death is an evil, it is an everlasting evil. For death seems to be the end of a wretched life; but if death is wretched, there can be no end. But why do I commemorate Socrates or Theramenes, men eminent in the renown of virtue and wisdom, when a certain Spartan, whose name has not even been recorded, so despised death that, when he was being led to it, condemned by the ephors, and was of cheerful and glad countenance, and a certain enemy had said to him, "Do you scorn the laws of Lycurgus?" he answered: "Nay, I owe him the greatest gratitude, who has punished me with a penalty which I can pay without borrowing and without a loan." O man worthy of Sparta! So that to me, at least, one of so great a spirit seems to have been condemned though innocent. Such men, past number, our own state has produced.

But why should I name leaders and chiefs, when Cato writes that legions often set out eagerly to that place from which they did not think to return? With like spirit the Spartans fell at Thermopylae, on whom Simonides wrote: "Tell, stranger, that here you saw us lying at Sparta, while we obey the sacred laws of our country." What does that leader Leonidas say? "March on with brave hearts, Spartans; today, perhaps, we shall dine among the dead." This was a brave race, while the laws of Lycurgus were in vigour. One of them, when a Persian enemy had said boastfully in a parley, "You will not see the sun for the multitude of our javelins and arrows," replied: "In the shade, then, we shall fight."

I commemorate men: what, pray, of that Spartan woman? Who, when she had sent her son into battle and heard that he was slain, said: "For this I had borne him, that there might be one who would not hesitate to meet death for his country." Be it so: brave and hard are the Spartans; the discipline of the state has great force. What? Do we not admire Theodorus of Cyrene, a philosopher of no mean repute? When King Lysimachus threatened him with the cross, he said: "Threaten, pray, those horrible things to your courtiers in purple: to Theodorus it makes no difference whether he rots on the ground or aloft." By which saying of his I am reminded to think that something must be said also about burial and the tomb — a matter not difficult, especially now that those things have been learned which were said a little before about feeling nothing. As to which, what Socrates indeed thought appears in that book in which he dies, of which we have already said so much.

For when he had discoursed of the immortality of souls, and the time of dying was already pressing, being asked by Crito how he wished to be buried, he said: "Much labour, my friends, have I spent in vain; for I have not persuaded our Crito that I shall fly away from here and leave nothing of myself behind. Nevertheless, Crito, if you can overtake me, or find me anywhere, bury me as shall seem good to you. But, believe me, none of you will overtake me, when I have departed hence." Excellently said by him, who both gave his friend leave and showed that he cared nothing about this whole matter.

Harder was Diogenes, who, though of the same mind, yet as a Cynic spoke more roughly: he ordered himself to be cast out unburied. Then his friends: "To the birds and beasts?" "By no means," he said, "but set a stick beside me, that I may drive them off." "How will you be able? for you will not feel." "What harm, then, will the mangling of beasts do me, who feel nothing?" Excellently Anaxagoras, who, when he was dying at Lampsacus, and his friends asked whether he wished to be carried, if anything should happen, to his homeland Clazomenae, said: "There is no need; for from every place the way to the world below is just as far." And on the whole question of burial, one thing must be held: that it pertains to the body, whether the soul has perished or is in vigour. And in the body it is plain that, whether the soul is extinguished or has slipped away, no sensation remains. But all things are full of errors.

Achilles drags Hector, bound to his chariot: he thinks, I suppose, that Hector is being mangled and feels it. So he takes vengeance, as at least it seems to himself; but she mourns it as a most bitter thing: "I saw — what I most grievously endured to see — Hector dragged by the four-horse chariot." What Hector? Or how long will that be Hector? Better says Accius, with an Achilles for once wise: "Nay, in very truth I gave back the body to Priam; Hector I took away." It was not Hector, then, that you dragged, but the body that had been Hector's.

Lo, another arises from the earth, who will not let his mother sleep: "Mother, I call upon you, who relieve care suspended in sleep, and you pity me not — rise and bury your son!" When these things are chanted in subdued and tearful measures, which bring sorrow upon whole theatres, it is hard not to judge those wretched who are unburied. "Before the beasts and birds —" he fears lest he should make less good use of his mangled limbs; he does not dread their being burned. "Nor let him suffer the half-eaten remains, the bones laid bare, to be foully dragged through the earth, smeared with gore —" I do not understand what he fears, when he pours forth such good seven-foot lines to the flute. It must be held, then, that nothing is to be cared for after death, though many take vengeance even on dead enemies. Thyestes, in Ennius, curses in fine verses indeed, first that Atreus may perish by shipwreck: this is hard, surely; for such a death is not without grievous sensation; but these are empty: "Himself fixed upon the topmost rough rocks, disembowelled, hanging by the side, bespattering the rocks with gore, with corruption and black blood —"

the rocks themselves will not be more void of all sensation than that man hanging by the side, for whom he thinks to wish this torment. These things would be hard, if he felt; without sensation they are nothing. But this, indeed, is utterly empty: "Nor let him have a tomb to receive him, a haven for the body, where, human life laid aside, the body may rest from its ills." See in how great an error these things are involved: he thinks the dead man has a haven for his body and rests in the tomb. Great is the fault of Pelops, who did not instruct his son nor teach him how far each thing was to be cared for.

But why should I observe the opinions of individuals, when I may survey the various errors of nations? The Egyptians embalm their dead and keep them at home; the Persians even smear them with wax before burying, that the bodies may last as long as possible. It is the custom of the Magi not to bury the bodies of their own unless they have first been mangled by beasts; in Hyrcania the common people keep dogs at public expense, the nobles at their own: a noble breed of dogs, as we know; but each, according to his means, provides those by which he is to be mangled, and they think this the best burial. Chrysippus gathers very many other things, being, as he is, curious in all manner of lore; but some are so foul that speech shrinks and recoils from them. This whole topic, then, is to be despised in our own case, not neglected in the case of our own kin — yet so that we who live perceive that the bodies of the dead feel nothing;

but how much is to be granted to custom and report, let the living see to that, yet so that they understand it pertains nothing to the dead. But surely death is met with the most even mind when the dying man can console himself, as life ends, with his own praises. No one has lived too short a while who has perfectly discharged the duty of perfect virtue. For me myself there were many times fitting for death. Would that I had been able to meet it! For nothing more was being gained, the duties of life were heaped full, and only the contests with fortune remained. Wherefore, if reason itself accomplishes the less to make us able to neglect death, yet let a life well lived accomplish it, that we may seem to have lived enough and more than enough. For although sensation will have departed, yet the dead are not without their own and proper goods of praise and glory, although they do not feel them. For though glory has in itself nothing why it should be sought, yet it follows virtue like a shadow.

But the true judgement of the multitude about good men, if ever it is good, is more to be praised than they are happy on that account. I cannot say, however this is to be taken, that Lycurgus and Solon lack glory for their laws and public discipline, or Themistocles and Epaminondas for their warlike valour. For Neptune will sooner overwhelm Salamis itself than the memory of the trophy of Salamis, and Leuctra will sooner be removed from Boeotia than the glory of the battle of Leuctra. But far more slowly will fame forsake Curius, Fabricius, Calatinus, the two Scipios, the two Africani, Maximus, Marcellus, Paulus, Cato, Laelius, and others past number; and whoever has caught some likeness to these — measuring it not by popular fame but by the true praise of good men — will, with confident spirit, if so things shall fall out, advance to death, in which we have learned there is either the highest good or no evil. Nay, when his affairs are prosperous, he will even wish to die; for the heaping-up of goods cannot be so pleasant as their loss is grievous. This sentiment seems to be signified by that saying of the Spartan, who, when the Rhodian Diagoras, a famous Olympic victor, had on a single day seen his two sons crowned as victors at Olympia, came up to the old man and, congratulating him, said:

"Die, Diagoras; for you are not going to ascend into heaven." Great things the Greeks think these, or rather thought them then; and he who said this to Diagoras, esteeming it a very great thing for three Olympic victors to come from one house, thought it useless to the man himself that he should linger longer in life, exposed to fortune. — But to you, indeed, I had answered, in few words, as it seemed to me, what was enough — for you had granted that the dead are in no evil — yet for this reason I strove to say more, because in longing and grief this is the greatest consolation. For we ought to bear with moderation the grief undertaken on our own account and for our own sake, lest we seem to love ourselves; but that suspicion tortures us with intolerable grief, if we imagine that those of whom we have been bereaved are, with some sensation, in those evils which the common run suppose. This opinion I wished to shake out of myself by the roots, and on that account I was perhaps the longer. — You, too long?

Not for me, indeed. For the former part of your discourse made me wish to die, the latter sometimes not to be unwilling, sometimes not to trouble myself; but by the whole discourse this at least has been accomplished, that I should not reckon death among evils. — Do we, then, even desire the epilogue of the rhetoricians? Or do we now quite abandon this art? — Do not you abandon it, which you have always adorned, and rightly too; for, if we are willing to speak the truth, it had adorned you. But what, pray, is that epilogue? For I long to hear it, whatever it is.

— Men are wont in the schools to bring forward the judgements of the immortal gods concerning death — nor indeed do they invent these themselves, but on the authority of Herodotus and several others. First are proclaimed Cleobis and Biton, sons of the Argive priestess. The tale is well known. For when it was lawful for her to be carried in a car to a solemn and appointed sacrifice, at a place far enough from the town to the shrine, and the draught-animals delayed, then those youths whom I just named, having laid aside their garments and anointed their bodies with oil, went up to the yoke. So the priestess, carried to the shrine, the car having been drawn by her sons, is said to have prayed the goddess to give them, as a reward for their piety, that which is the greatest that can be given to man by a god; after which the young men, having feasted with their mother, gave themselves to sleep, and in the morning were found dead.

With a like prayer Trophonius and Agamedes are said to have prayed; who, when they had built a temple for Apollo at Delphi, worshipping the god, asked a reward — and no small one — for their work and labour: nothing definite, but whatever was best for man. To whom Apollo showed that he would give it on the third day after that day; and when that day dawned, they were found dead. The god judged, they say — and he indeed a god to whom the rest of the gods had granted that he should divine beyond all others. There is told, too, a certain little tale about Silenus; who, when he had been captured by Midas, is written to have given him this gift in return for his release: that he taught the king that the best thing by far for man is not to be born, and the next best, to die as soon as possible.

Which sentiment Euripides used in his Cresphontes: "For it would befit us, gathering in throngs, to mourn the house where someone has been brought forth into the light, reckoning the various ills of human life; but him who has ended his grievous toils by death, him to escort forth with every praise and gladness, as friends." Something like this is in the Consolation of Crantor: for he says that a certain Elysius of Terina, when he was grievously mourning the death of his son, came to a place of consulting the dead, asking what had been the cause of so great a calamity; and that to him these three little verses of this kind were given on tablets: "Men err in life with minds unknowing: Euthynous won death by the will of the fates. Thus was it more profitable both for him and for you to be ended."

Using these and like authorities, they affirm that the case has been judged by the immortal gods. Alcidamas, indeed, an ancient rhetorician among the most famous, even wrote a Praise of Death, which consists of an enumeration of human ills; he lacked those reasonings which are more nicely gathered by the philosophers, but he did not lack richness of speech. But glorious deaths met for one's country are wont to seem to the rhetoricians not only glorious but even blessed. They go back to Erechtheus, whose daughters too eagerly sought death for the life of the citizens; they commemorate Codrus, who flung himself into the midst of the enemy in a servant's garb, that he might not be recognized, had he been in royal array — because an oracle had been given that, if the king were slain, Athens would be victorious; Menoeceus is not passed over, who likewise, an oracle being delivered, lavished his blood upon his country; for Iphigenia at Aulis bids herself be led to be sacrificed, that the enemy be drawn forth by her blood. From there they come to nearer instances: Harmodius is on every lip and Aristogiton; the Spartan Leonidas, the Theban Epaminondas are in vigour. Our own men they do not know, whom it would be a great task to enumerate: so many are they whose deaths we see to have been desirable, with glory. Since this is so, must we nonetheless use great eloquence, and harangue as from a higher place, so that men may either begin to wish for death, or at least cease to fear it?

For if that last day brings not extinction but a change of place, what is more to be wished? But if it utterly destroys and blots out, what is better than to fall asleep amid the toils of life, and so, closing the eyes, to be lulled in everlasting sleep? And if this should be so, the saying of Ennius is better than that of Solon. For this poet of ours says: "Let no one honour me with tears, nor perform my funeral with weeping!" But that wise man: "Let not my death lack tears: let us leave to our friends mourning, that they may celebrate our funeral with lamentation."

But we, indeed, if any such thing should befall as to seem announced by a god, that we should depart from life, let us obey gladly and giving thanks, and think that we are being released from prison and freed from chains, that we may either sail back to our eternal and truly our own home, or be free of all sensation and trouble; but if nothing be announced, let us nonetheless be of such a mind as to count that dreadful day, dreadful to others, blessed to us, and to reckon nothing among evils which has been appointed either by the immortal gods or by Nature, the parent of all. For not at random nor by chance were we sown and created, but assuredly there was a certain power that took thought for the human race, and would not have begotten or nourished that which, when it had drained out all its toils, should then fall into the everlasting evil of death: let us rather think a haven and a refuge prepared for us.

Would that it were permitted to sail thither with spread sails! But if we are driven back by contrary winds, yet we must needs be carried to the same place, only a little later. But what is necessary for all — can that be wretched for one alone? You have your epilogue, lest you should think anything passed over or left out. — I have indeed; and this epilogue, moreover, has made me the firmer. — Excellent, I say. But for now let us yield something to our health; tomorrow, however, and as many days as we shall be in the Tusculan villa, let us pursue these matters, and chiefly those which afford relief from distresses, terrors, and desires — which is the most plentiful fruit of all philosophy.